0.0.3 - You get what you give
Don't worry, when I am back at work, things will calm down and you won't have to endure me putting up blog posts every day or so, fictional reader. Do I feel guilty producing these with dangerous regularity even though I have absolutely no expectation of anyone reading them? Or is that a lie I am telling myself so I don't feel any rejection or disappointment when people choose not read them? Should I expect people to? Probably not, as my insights - such as they are - are no more valid and informed than anything else on an internet rapidly trending towards uselessness. This dialogue,, in tone if not in content, is generally what is going on in my head 90% of the time, which probably explains why I am perpetually trying to overwhelm my own inner monologue with other people's music.
I've been thinking a lot about the transition to music streaming services in my lifetime over the past few months. It's certainly my ethical white whale/trojan horse hybrid, a mahogany porpoise that dispenses angry, bitter and vengeful sea captains to ravage the undefended suburbs of my conscience every time I open the gates and bring it inside. The convenience is undeniable, and I've written elsewhere in the earlier incarnation of this blog of the pure danger of investing 50-100% of your monthly new music budget on an album only to find it not to your taste/doesn't sound like the one single you like/sounds exactly the same as the one single you like all the way through. Having instant and unfettered access to 98% of the catalogue of published western music has made discoverability a breeze, has enabled me to do stuff like this (better judgement has meant that there are probably not 1000 different albums in this house in total, even if you fold in all of Catherine's weird Latin American pop CDs she bought in Mexico).
I'm also keenly aware of what it has cost us. We've mortgaged, as a collective, our access to music into the hands of a few media companies I wouldn't trust to tell me the time without checking my wallet immediately after; it's generally destroyed the 'value proposition' of music itself, made it ubiquitous and ever-present, meaning in the minds of many, cheap and disposable. And obviously, with the exceptions of the mega-successful acts, turned the dream of making it big with one record and making some level of life changing money from it, into a reality only for the people profiting from the release of new music, the owners of the platforms themselves.
I hate it, I love it, I can't leave it. Again, nothing new here, just wanted to say it out loud, primarily to lead into this six pack of albums.
I spent a long time in December considering what to listen to in January. It's a time of new starts and beginnings, so maybe some debut albums? There's some global events coming up I can tie at least a couple of albums to thematically, lets pencil those in. That didn't get me very far. With the entirety of music to pluck from, was I going to just start randomly grabbing albums at a whim?
Then I thought about albums from Januarys past, and here, six paragraphs in, we get to the lede. There are albums, only a few, indelibly linked in my mind to the start of a new year because they were given as gifts the previous Christmas, another practice streaming services have consigned currently to the dustbin of history (watch this space for future discussions about my changing feelings on physical media as it relates to music and its importance), and we are as generations all the poorer for it.
Unless you have an incredibly on-trend fifteen year old niece with her own record player you can buy vinyl album for, the rite of passing music to others through gifts is a lost art. It's not a practice for the timid, as music is as subjective as it comes and the danger of buying something seriously uncool/out of date or exposing yourself to ridicule for what you perceive your gift recipients tastes might be and missing by a wide mark is high. However, the flavour that you gain outweighs the risk, as the poets once wrote. A successful gift of music can send people down a trajectory previously unconsidered into territory unexplored. There are albums which forever will sit with me because from the time they were gifted to me, they were played ad nauseum and at whatever volume I thought I could get away with for weeks through January before they outstayed their initial welcome.
Actually and E.S.P. were Christmas gifts in 1987, along with a Sony Walkman; these were the first albums I consider actually mine to own, as they lived with me in my bedroom, could be played by me at will (double-A batteries allowing) without required permission or approval. I'm not sure what my parents were thinking with these choices, and its possible they weren't - we were living overseas at the time and I'm not sure the available cassette choices that would appeal to an eleven year old were particularly diverse, but I listened to both of these albums relentlessly - specifically on the bus on the way to school I remember, beginning a long, long, long career of commuting to music. Actually is a great album that like Super Troupers, counts amongst its ranks several Greatest Hits stalwarts. I'm pretty sure eleven year old me wasn't really processing the lyrical content of forbidden love and explicitly gay romances at the time, but they're starkly present on revisiting it. It's A Sin is a behemoth still, and I was transported via Neil Tennant to a bleaker time in society and what it meant for people to be vilified for their feelings. Not everything has changed for the worse.
E.S.P. is the opposite, a forgettable album by a band who's sound is wildly out of time. I think You Win Again is decent and I certainly remember that being my favourite on first listening to this album, but for pure strangeness, I'd recommend This Is Your Life which is a Bee Gee's song with the whitest educational-rap-flow rap verse in history which also namechecks all the Bee Gee's former hits. It's an enormous sticker that says "we're out of ideas and have no idea how to relate to modern music - is this what you want?".
Now, let's talk about Crusade and how our memories can play tricks on us. The very first album I 'owned' predates the 1987 gifts by a few years. As kid, I loved the TV adventure serials with puppets in them. If Gerry Anderson or Supermarionation were in the title card, I was there, sat 6 inches from the TV, watching it. My favourite was weird Japanese transplant Star Fleet (known as X-Bomber in Japan), which had done the Power Rangers thing before Power Rangers, been redubbed entirely, edited to ribbons, and thrown on TV for kids who didn't care that it didn't make sense, just that it had a big robot in it. It also had a theme song which went incredibly hard and I loved.
Let me call your attention to track three on this 'album', which I should add, is precisely 3 songs long, has two interviews as tracks 4 and 5, and two live versions of the first tracks and for some reason, two live versions of We Will Rock you on there.
For four decades I thought the Star Fleet song was recorded by John Mayall (which in hindsight, seemed like an obviously insane choice). So this morning, I listened to a John Mayall record as a stand in for this record, which was nothing to do with him. But I listened to a great Blues album, drinking a fancy coffee and watching the sun come up, and it reminded me how great really well performed Blues music is, so it wasn't all a waste. I've listened to the Star Fleet songs now as well as I write this, but it doesn't count. It's barely an album, and I'd feel bad including it. The main theme still slaps though.
Showbiz I was given by my parents in 1999 along with a copy of the first Harry Potter book, which they'd read about in the Guardian and thought I might like. One of these things has aged better than the other, and I've written previously about my feelings on Muse, but I still think if Origin of Symmetry didn't exist, this would be my favourite Muse album, and the high water mark for their long, long, long subsequent career.
Blur's self-titled album is forever linked to Final Fantasy VII, another gift pairing by my parents, this time with a slightly better hit rate. While I am sure this is sacrilegious to chip-tunes enthusiasts, but I regularly turned the music off on my Playstation games in favour of listening to my own choice of music performed, you know, on instruments by bands. I'm not saying there is no value in video games music (there are some brilliant examples we might get to later this year) but the fidelity of the PS1 sound did not compare to my hi-fi, and for me, the soundtrack of Golden Saucer and Midgar is Blur's album about how much they hate touring in America.
The last one wasn't mine, but Catherine's. I asked her whether she had any albums which she remembers being gifted and playing, and Watermark was the only one she could really bring to mind - no real music-gifting tradition in her family. I asked her if she hadn't even ever had something from her younger sister for Christmas musically, and she said "There was a time where she was listening to Nirvana and The Pixies and I was more into Clannad, so not really". If you ever need a shorthand for the personality differences between Catherine and her sister, this is all the information you need. I remember it being played in our household too, often while we were driving between Warsaw and Berlin when we were living overseas, possibly as an attempt to put my sister and I to sleep during the 8 hour drive.
I wonder if we will ever get back to the days of being able to gift someone music again and hope you nailed it. "Merry Christmas, here's a Spotify link to an album I think you might like" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
